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Socialbots Game Twitter

April 13, 2011 on 8:17 pm | In Build, IdBlog, Spin | Add a Comment

The May issue of The Atlantic has funny-scary piece about a social engineering contest on Twitter. Titled Are You Following a Bot?, the brief article outlines a recently concluded experiment by the Web Ecology Project wherein socialbots (programs) were let loose on the Twitter network to try to win friends and influence people.

Turns out, they did pretty well. According to the Web Ecology post on the contest, “In under a week, Team C’s bot was able to generate close to 200 responses from the target network, with conversations ranging from a few back and forth tweets to an actual set of lengthy interchanges between the bot and the targets.”

Think of the labor that can be saved if you outsource all those boring tweets about what you ate for lunch and the cute thing your cat did today to a bot! Free from the chains of Twitter, regular people will have scads more time for walking around outside, or engaging in F2F conversations with other actual people. And, if socialbots can pass the Turing Test, marketers have gained a powerful new spamming tool.

Apparently, the applications of the tech may be a bit more sinister than that. As The Atlantic story noted, “A week after [the Web Ecology Project's] experiment ended, Anonymous, a notorious hacker group, penetrated the e-mail accounts of the cyber-security firm HBGary Federal and revealed a solicitation of bids by the United States Air Force in June 2010 for ‘Persona Management Software’—a program that would enable the government to create multiple fake identities that trawl social-networking sites to collect data on real people and then use that data to gain credibility and to circulate propaganda.”